One of the strongest aspects of a catalog is often viewed as the images and the layout. These two things go together to allow a person to pick up the catalog and immediately get a feel for what they are about to read.

And this is mostly certainly going to be important. Make no mistake about the impact that a strong layout can have on a persons ability to navigate calmly and casually through your catalog without ever getting bored. It is also very important to give people good images of what they are going to be buying. Visuals have a long history of impacting what a person thinks of a certain product.

I am sure you have seen something before and said to yourself, Now that looks interesting, and from there you went into the process wanting to buy the product based on that first impression. This is the kind of impression you want to be able to form with your catalog printing by providing people with those strong images.

But what gets left in the dust a little too often is the writing. So much attention is focused on the design aspect of the catalogs that not enough time gets given to the writing.

The blurb about a product needs to do more than just tell people what that product is. Yet all the time this is all I see about a product in a catalog. They go to great lengths to give me a good picture while handing me only a brief description of what the product actually is.

A strong description needs to accomplish three primary different goals. The first is the product description. It tells people exactly what the product does. The second is all the different things, or a good list of the things that the product can be used for. Think about late night infomercials where they give you all these difference examples of what a product could do that you might not have considered.

Lastly you need to tell them how this applies to them. Tell them not only what it does but also how they can improve their life by using it. Go into all the details you need to about how their life will be made easier and better by buying this product.

The images and the overall design aspect of your catalog printing is the first step towards making a sale, but the writing needs to be what closes it. You are enticing them first, and once you have their attention, youre explaining exactly why they should want to buy your product.

Both are equally important, and both require the same amount of attention. What good is grabbing a persons attention if your writing is not strong enough to encourage them to buy anything?

From: Catalog Printing
http://www.printplace.com/printing/booklets.aspx